"It's tantamount to killing the university," snapped the
president of France's Avignon University, Geologist Joël Mahé. What has
aroused Mahé and most of his fellow French university presidents is a
decision by France's tough-minded minister of universities, Alice
Saunier-Seïté, to cut back proliferating graduate degree programs at
the nation's 76 universities, which in France are both accredited and
financed by the state.

With little advance warning, Saunier-Seïté chose this academic year as
the time to guillotine 1,131 or 30% of all master's and doctoral degree
programs, mostly in the humanities and social sciences.
Among...